Milk Documentation

Welcome to the milk documentation!

milk provides a high-performance framework and tools for image processing and analysis, particularly suited for building real-time execution pipelines (such as Adaptive Optics loops) out of small modular units. The framework provides zero-copy tensor passing and instant parameter synchronization.

🚀 Getting Started

If you are new to the milk environment, follow these steps:

1. Install milk — clone, build, and configure.
2. CLI Overview — understand milk-cli and standalone executables.
3. Shared Memory Streams — core concept: zero-copy image passing.
4. Function Processing System (FPS) — core concept: process parameters and configuration.
5. Developer Tutorial — write your first compute module.

🏛️ Core Architecture

For a deep dive into how milk components interact at a system level, these documents explain the underlying structures.

• Software Architecture: Top-level hierarchical overview of the system design, subsystems, and data flow.
• Programmer's Guide: The best starting point to understand the overall architecture, C API, and CMake setup.
• Dependency Graph: Visual map of module dependencies.
• FPS Standalone and CMD Modes: Execution context details for milk-fpsexec-* binaries.
• Process Info (procinfo): Telemetry, heartbeat monitoring, and profiling.
• Debugging: GDB, procinfo diagnostics, tmux log inspection, common failure patterns.
• Performance Tuning: CPU pinning, RT scheduling, shared memory, GPU acceleration.
• PGO & LTO Optimization: Profile-guided optimization + static LTO for 15–40% speedup.

🛠️ Developer Guides

Guidelines and tutorials for writing your own compute modules or extending the CLI framework.

• Coding Standards: C coding conventions for milk.
• Adding Plugins: How to build modules that compile alongside the core.
• Template Source Code: Breakdown of the example C module.
• Loading Custom Modules: Linking .so modules at runtime.
• Working With Git: Branching and commit workflow.
• Documenting Code: In-code documentation standards.
• Developer Tutorial: Step-by-step guide to writing your first module.
• Module Files Layout: Directory structure conventions.
• Python API: Accessing streams from Python with pyMilk and numpy.
• Valkey Integration: Multi-host FPS parameter sync via Valkey.
• Code Assist Tools: Agent rules and workflows for AI-assisted development.

📖 CLI & Tools Reference

• CLI Core Syntax: Argument parsing and command invocation rules.
• Readline Keys: Keyboard shortcuts inside the milk shell.
• Scripts Reference: All milk-* shell scripts and utilities.
• Help Text: Built-in help text reference.
• FAQ & Troubleshooting: Common issues and solutions.
• Automatically Generated Index: Complete list of all Markdown files in the repository.

🔬 API Reference

• Doxygen API Docs: Auto-generated C API reference with call graphs and source browser.

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Can't find what you're looking for? Check the Automatically Generated Document Index for all plugin READMEs.

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